A few days ago, I spent 14 minutes standing in front of a single piece of artwork, a 1998 installation called “Las Twines.” Life-size, hyperrealistic sculptures of two little girls — the twins — sharing a swing. They were dressed identically in communion dresses and wore boxing gloves featuring Puerto Rican flags, but one had blonde hair and light skin and the other was dark-skinned with dark hair. They stared placidly ahead, while museum visitors like me were left to stare back and ponder how the world might treat these two girls with shared DNA and different complexions. It was uncanny, it was thought-provoking, it was beautiful and sad. I wasn’t sure whether I liked it, I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to. It’s art, after all.
What exactly does Trump think is in the Smithsonian?
Following his most recent executive order, I went in search of some “corrosive ideology.”
It was part of an exhibit that Donald Trump had cited by name the day before, in an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The president had declared that federally run museums such as the Smithsonian were promoting a “corrosive ideology” that needed to be course-corrected. “Under this historical revision,” the order read, “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
This is, of course, a ready-made column idea — Let’s go see the corrosive art in person — but it turns out this is easier said than done: Trump cited an alleged exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, but some googling revealed that the offending verbiage was actually part of an online infographic that hadn’t been displayed since 2020. He dinged the forthcoming American Women’s History Museum for celebrating transgender athletes, but how would he or I know what curators planned to include? The museum is still 10 years away. Ground hasn’t even been broken yet.
There was, however, one exhibit that seemed to be causing Trump particular consternation that I could go visit. The American Art Museum is eight blocks from my office, and is currently hosting “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” which includes “Las Twines” and 81 other artworks created between 1792 and 2023.
So, I walked over on a Friday morning. I hadn’t been in years. I spent about four hours there; I could have spent 40 more. I planned to write — oh, you can probably guess what I planned to write. This order is asinine, this president is terrible, blah blah blah. Whatever you wanted that column to say, it probably would have said.
But here’s the thing: the “The Shape of Power” is just one exhibit, on the museum’s third floor. To get to it, you have to walk past everything else, which, if you keep stopping and looking at things, as museums intend for you to do, will take you hours. And when I was done, what I wanted to share more than anything else wasn’t a screed about Donald Trump, but instead what I saw at the museum.
In a massive stone building in downtown Washington — a museum that is absolutely free to absolutely any person who wants to walk through the doors, that is open 364 days a year — I saw paintings by Edward Hopper and Frederic Remington, Georgia O’Keeffe and Grandma Moses. I saw landscapes of dense forests and tall mountains and deep lakes, and rainbows rising over “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.” I saw — in the walls of an institution created to be America’s museum; the Smithsonians host as many as 30 million visitors a year — the meticulous realism of John Singer Sargent’s society ladies, reclined in their finery, and I saw pioneer women shading her eyes to look out over dry plains, and I saw a lonely ship sailing so small under the northern lights of Alaska.
On my way to get to “The Shape of Power,” I saw the most vibrant paintings of Negro League baseball players, and of Black schoolchildren playing after school in 1936 Brooklyn, and I saw so many paintings depicting the vast mass of the American West, back when Europeans hadn’t even mapped it, back when it was an idea to them more than a place, and I saw paintings of the Brits and Germans who came to discover that American West, and paintings of the Sioux and Cherokees they displaced and harmed in order to own it, and all of those groups of people were painted with such dignity, all the heroes of their own stories, all trying so hard to figure out how to live in this country. I saw mountain lions.
I saw artworks made of bottle caps and artworks made of wood carvings and artworks made of farm equipment and an astounding, enormous altar made by a Black man named James Hampton who declared himself the “Director of Special Projects for the State of Eternity,” who served in the segregated U.S. Army and then worked as a janitor, and who created this astonishing, overwhelming work that took up an entire wall, as an ode to his faith, when he got home from cleaning other people’s messes. Art belonged to Hampton as much as it belonged to Hopper, who had trained for six years under masters at New York School of Art and Design. Art belonged to everyone.
On my way to the exhibit that Trump says revises history and makes the country look inaccurately racist, I saw a painting from 1946 called “Frightful New York,” in which the female painter, Hisako Hibi, expressed how jarring it felt to reach the big city after spending three years forcibly incarcerated in an internment camp along with 120,000 other innocent Japanese Americans under orders from a U.S. president. That painting was made 79 years ago, so don’t tell me that we’re rewriting racism into history, it has always been there.
I saw a painting called “A Visit From the Old Mistress,” in which four women who had presumably once been enslaved reluctantly greet the White woman who had once purported to own them. The way the mistress stares at them as though she expected a better welcome. The way they look at her with hatred and exhaustion and impatience and fear. The way they know they can’t express any of this out loud. This painting is from 1876. Don’t you dare tell me this is a new way we are telling history; voices have been trying to tell history this way for 150 years.
Our nation’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness” — for who? Whose happiness did we advance? Whose happiness did we overlook? Who got to have individual rights and who was coded as property in legal and official documents for centuries of our great nation’s history?
I saw the portrait of Woodrow Wilson, where the placard talked about how he had been a champion of curbing abusive business practices and improving conditions for workers but also how he was regressive when it came to women’s rights and civil rights. As a worker, I can thank him and as a woman, I can hate him, and as a graduate of the liberal arts college where Wilson once taught, I can feel a historic connection to him, and as a citizen of 2025 I can be proud of my alma mater for wrestling with its connection to the man. I am able to hold all of those positions at once. I think we all can.
On my way to visit the corrosive art that I cannot imagine Trump has actually seen, I dropped in on a school tour where the guide plopped down a bunch of sixth-graders in front of a magnificent portrait of George Washington — the most famous one, the one by Gilbert Stuart — and there she revealed that there are actually multiple versions of this portrait in existence. They’re drafts. Some are just sketches; some contain just his face. They’re all just rough drafts that got closer and closer to the real thing, as the artist tried his best to capture this complicated man, this founder of our country, this enslaver, this hero. And that is how history is made. Rough drafts, again and again.
On my way to visit the corrosive art, I dropped in on another tour group, this one containing mostly Japanese Americans. On that tour, one tourist gently interrupted the tour guide to ask whether she would like a complete translation of some of the Japanese calligraphy that was written on one of the paintings. The tour guide, who was White, exclaimed delightedly that, yes she would, she would love the full translation. And now she has learned something new about the place where she worked every day, and a painting she walked past every hour.
And that is America. That is how we tell the story of America. Together. Each one of us contributing what we can, and when we learn something new, we think about how wonderful it is to learn it, rather than burying the new information down where it can’t hurt us.
I made it, finally, to “The Shape of Power.” I spent 14 minutes with “Las Twines,” and another 45 just wandering around, through sculptures massive and small, old and new, literal and inscrutable. If you are looking for something to be shocked by, you can probably find it. But no more so than anywhere else in the museum. No more so than anywhere else in our history. America is a shocking place — shockingly beautiful and shockingly violent. And the people in it will make you weep with every emotion that can prompt tears. Jubilant, sad, ridiculous, sublime. It’s America, after all.
You cannot love America without hating it a little bit. But you cannot hate it without loving it so, so much. Wanting it to be better. Wanting it to be what we all deserve.
As I stood with the tour groups and the lunch crowd and the tired families pushing strollers and doling out juice boxes — as I stood in this completely free institution that exists for no other reason than to help America learn something about itself, that was the most shocking realization of all: The Smithsonian is not filled with hatred toward our busted, struggling, awesome country; it is filled with the deepest love, and that is what I learned at the museum.